Suitable for Hanging
Lynne Stanshine
Smashwords Edtition
Copyright 2011 Lynne Stanshine
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Another Quote Book?
No madam.
You'll find Suitable for Hanging is full of rare quotes.
Also it's a riot.
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Dedication
To Lowell, Lisa, Sheree, Stacy and Melissa
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Table of Contents
~ A ~
Accuracy
Acting
Adultery
Advertising
Advice
Aging
Agreement
Alcohol
Alienation
Altruism
America
American Cities/States (also see: Hollywood)
Anger
Animals
Archaeology
Architecture
Art
ACCURACY
Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Mark Twain)
When I take a gun in hand, the safest place for a pheasant is just opposite the muzzle. (Sydney Smith)
Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction. (Charles Revson)
Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. (Wyatt Earp)
The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy. (Florence Scovel Shinn)
Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy. (Martha Beck)
ACTING
Acting consists of the ability to keep an audience from coughing. (Benjamin Franklin)
It looks exciting but it ain’t nothing. It’s what you call show business. (Dizzy Gillespie)
Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. (Rosalind Russell)
A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he’s not alone in the way feels about himself. (Jack Carson)
An actor is a guy who, if you aren’t talking about him, isn’t listening. (Marlon Brando)
Acting is the most minor gift. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four. (Katharine Hepburn)
If you give audiences a chance, they’ll do half of your acting for you. (Katharine Hepburn)
I’m too tired and old and rich for all this, so let’s do the scene. (Spencer Tracy)
(She was)… ‘A graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts. (George Sanders)
The best actor in the world is the one who feels the most and shows the least. (Jean-Louis Trintignant)
The best screen actor is that man who can do nothing extremely well. (Alfred Hitchcock)
The main thing is, if you talk too much, the audience won’t remember anything. So say something short and memorable (Steve McQueen)
Upon being told by a Country Club he wanted to join, that actors were not accepted, Victor Mature answered ‘I’m no actor and I’ve got sixty-four pictures to prove it.’
Victor Mature regarding doing his stunts… ‘I wouldn’t walk up a wet step.’
I’ve got two looks - my left face and my right face. Which do you want? (Victor Mature)
James Cagney’s philosophy of acting is… ‘Plant your feet on the ground, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.”
I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries. (Frank Capra)
When actress Mary Anderson asked Director, Alfred Hitchcock… ‘What do you think is my best side?’ Hitchcock replied, ‘My dear, you’re sitting on it.
Acting is happy agony. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
ADULTERY
My tailor asked me, ‘If your wife and your mistress were drowning, which one would you save?’ and I said, ‘my wife, because my mistress would understand.’ (“X, Y and Z”)
A line from a French farce - a peeping Tom, reporting to a justifiable jealous husband with his eye to the keyhole of a bedroom. ‘They are locked like letters in a monogram!’ (S. N. Behrman)
As a musician I tell you that if you were suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note. (George Bizet)
No adultery is bloodless. (Natalia Ginzburg)
ADVERTISING
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. (Stephen Leacock)
A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising. (James Collins)
A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter. (Nicholas Johnson)
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half. (John Wanamaker)
Advertising is legalized lying. (H. G. Wells)
I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second. (Steven Wright)
Advertising is the ‘wonder’ in Wonder Bread. (Jeff I. Richards)
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need (Will Rogers)
Advertising: a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. (Northrop Frye)
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. (Marshall McLuhan)
Advertising is totally unnecessary. Unless you hope to make money. (Jeff I. Richards)
Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is. (Fairfax Cone)
An advertising agency is 85% confusion and 15% commission. (Fred Allen)
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency. (Raymond Chandler)
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise. (Laurence J. Peter)
If you can afford to advertise, you don’t need to. (Norman Ralph Augustine)
ADVICE
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. (Erica Jong)
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. (Mark Twain)
All men should strive to learn before they die what they running from, and to, and why. (James Thurber)
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. (Mark Twain)
Be honest with yourself until the end of your life. Then listen to the slow movement of the Schubert Quintet and kick the bucket. (Nathan Milstein)
Be more significant than you DO. (Quentin Crisp)
Be not afraid of growing slowly be afraid only of standing still. Chinese Proverb)
Be very punctual always to arise at midnight and turn your nights into day. A person should sleep several hours during the day so he needs only a little sleep during the night. (Besht)
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. (Henry David Thoreau)
Caress the divine details (Vladimir Nabokov)
Do not turn your back on anyone. You may be painted on one side only. (Stanislaw J. Lec)
Don’t bite the hand that has your allowance in it. (Unknown)
Don’t look back; someone might be gaining on you. (Satchel Paige)
Don’t chew on crayons. You’ll get crayola poisoning. (Martha Grimes)
Do what you most want to do, whether or not it is of any value to anyone else. (M.F.K. Fisher)
Fall seven times - stand up eight. (Japanese Proverb)
Here’s a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once. (Tallulah Bankhead)
If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it. (Lord Brabazon)
If you can’t be funny, be interesting. (Harold Ross)
If you live in the world, you must live on the world’s terms. (Marjorie Bowen)
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me. (Hunter S. Thompson)
I have a simple philosophy. Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full and scratch where it itches. (Unknown)
In the fight between you and the world… back the world. (Franz Kafka)
In regards to the aged, give them rest; in regard to friends, show them sincerity; in regard to the young, treat them tenderly. (Confucius)
Just a look away and there is a degree of freshness to the next glance. (Lynn Meyer)
Keep your broken arm inside your sleeve. (Chinese Proverb)
Let us live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry. (Mark Twain)
Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. (Harold Robbins)
Make haste slowly. (Unknown)
Make yourself necessary to somebody. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
There is no point in giving a gift unless one also treasures it oneself. (Colette)
Never complain, never explain. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Never frighten a little man. He’ll kill you. (Robert Heinlein)
Never grow a wishbone, where your backbone ought to be. (Clementine Paddleford)
Never invest in anything that eats or needs repairing. (Bernard Baruch)
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much. (G. K. Chesterton)
Never mistake endurance for hospitality. (Unknown)
Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance. (Sam Brown)
Never play cards with a man named Doc; Never eat at a place called Mom’s; Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. (Unknown)
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. (Unknown)
Never than anybody for anything, except a drink of water in the desert - and then make it brief. (Gene Fowler)
Never write a letter while you are angry. (Chinese Proverb)
Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage. (Benjamin Disraeli)
No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from. (Unknown)
Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say. (Will Durant)
Only one valid law: never hurt others; never diminish others; never answer insults. (Jean Cocteau)
Obviously, the only rational solution to your problem is suicide. (Unknown)
People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Ben Franklin said it first. (David H. Comins)
Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul, even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. (Swami Sivannda)
Softness triumphs over hardness, feebleness over strength. What is more malleable is always superior over that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation. (Lao Tzu)
Take what you can use and let the rest go by. (Ken Kesey)
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. (T.S. Eliot)
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. (Paul Ehrlich)
The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be. (Bruce Lee)
The main thing is not to let go of the vine. (Johnny Weissmuller)
The only thing to do with family skeletons was to take them out of the closet and dance with them. (George Bernard Shaw)
The only thing you can’t do is something you don’t want to do. (Bernie the Bus driver)
The shortest way to do many things is to do one thing at a time. (Unknown)
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. (Henri Bergson)
Treat failure and success the same, they are both impostors. (Rudyard Kipling)
Try everything once except incest and folk dancing. (Sir Thomas Beecham)
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. (Albert Einstein)
What’s right is what feels good afterwards. (Ernest Hemingway)
When all else fails - lower your standards. (Unknown)
When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself. (Shunryu Suzuki)
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. (Chinese Proverb)
When you see a snake, never mind where he comes from. (W. G. Benham)
Why doesn’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone? (Jimmy Durante)
AGING
After forty, we are responsible for our own faces. (Jean Cocteau)
Age and treachery will overcome skill and youth. (Unknown)
Aging: The only good thing about it is you’re not dead. (Lillian Hellman)
And now is the time to throw in the towel and stop ordering your dresses a little too big, so you can grow into them. (Dorothy Parker)
A sarcastic actress once said to Rosalind Russell, ‘I dread to think of life at forty-five.’
‘Why?’ asked Russell, ‘What happened then?’
At a funeral, John Barrymore was about to depart with the other mourners when he saw an old man lingering behind, staring down into the grave. Barrymore sidled up to the fellow and whispered, ‘I guess it hardly pays to go home.’
At age 75, S.N. Behrman said, ‘I have had just about all I can take of myself.’
Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable. (Ebner-Eschenbach)
‘But though I am an old man, I am but a young gardener. (Thomas Jefferson)
I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me. (Stephen Fry)
Young as compared with the Grand Canyon, for instance? (Dorothy Parker)
Few people know how to be old. (Francois La Rochefoucauld)
For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex. (Gore Vidal)
Grow old with me!
The best is yet to be. (Robert Browning)
Her facial prettiness was perhaps five years past its best moment. (Dashiell Hammett)
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were? (Satchel Paige)
I am in the prime of senility. (Joel Chandler Harris)
I feel age like an icicle down my back. (Dyson Carter)
If I’d known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself. (Leon Eldred)
If you keep having birthdays, you’ll eventually die. (Groucho Marx)
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. (T.S. Eliot)
It always takes twenty years to realize you were once blessed. (Lucille Kallen)
I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee. (Raymond Chandler)
I’m somewhere between The Blue Lagoon and On Golden Pond. (Unknown)
I refuse to admit I’m more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate. (Lady Nancy Astor)
In a dream you are never eighty. (Anne Sexton)
…it struck me that at my age every acquaintance is a prospective mourner… (Paul Theroux)
It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are. (Unknown)
Jewelry takes people’s minds off your wrinkles. (Sonja Henie)
Maturity, my dear, in case you haven’t noticed, is letting things happen. (Amanda Cross)
Middle age is when, wherever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater. (Denis Norden)
No one had told them that Age was a place where you sat with a curious mask on your face. (Margaret Widdemer)
Nothing ages a woman like living in the country. (Colette)
Now she sits in her brother’s widow’s house
Skin like a lizard
Aura like a daffodil
Migrant guest from relative to in-law
She stares into the embers and
Remembers. (The Incredible String Band)
Old age is the verdict of life. (Amelia Barr)
On aging: ‘Sex doesn’t disappear with teeth.’ (Unknown)
One of the good things about getting older is that you find you’re more interesting than most of the people you meet. (Lee Marvin)
‘Promise me,’ he said on his seventieth birthday, ‘I shall never grow old’ (Unknown)
Regarding a man of fifty, ‘His wind is gone and his dignity has not yet arrived. (Raymond Chandler)
She is so old, she counts in Roman numerals. (Unknown)?
The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine floor. (P. G. Wodehouse)
Then I climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead. (Evelyn Waugh)
The only adult entirely without face lines is the idiot. (Josephine Tey)
They made the mistake all young people do when visiting the very old; we’re easy game, we’re deaf to sarcasm and can’t see them wink. (Paul Theroux)
They tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much. (Malcolm Crowley)
Unready to die, but already at the stage when one starts to dislike the young. (Wystan Hugh Auden)
We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves. (May Lamberton Becker)
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs. (James Thurber)
Wrinkled was not one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up. (Unknown)
Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she would not part with it. (Rudyard Kipling)
Youth is a gift of nature, but age is work of art. (Garson Kanin)
Be very punctual always to arise at midnight and turn your nights into day. A person should sleep several hours during the day so he needs only a little sleep during the night. (Besht)
AGREEMENT
Ah! Don’t say you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong. (Oscar Wilde)
ALCOHOL
A victim of the use of water as a beverage. (Sam Houston)
A woman drove me to drink and I never had the courtesy to thank her. (W. C. Fields)
Drinking removes warts and other skin blemishes. Not from you, but from the people you are drinking with. (Jackie Gleason)
Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness. (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
Enjoyed it? One more drink and I’d have been under the host. (Dorothy Parker)
Erich von Stroheim said of Niagara Falls: ‘So much water and no whiskey.
Everybody should believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink. (Unknown)
I always wake up at the crack of ice. (Joe E. Lewis)
I am no alcoholic. I’m a drunkard. There’s a difference. I don’t have to go to meetings. (Jackie Gleason)
I don’t hold with too much water. Rusts the bones. (Percy Kilbride)
I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes in Singapore with a full beard. (Raymond Chandler)
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. (Unknown)
I drink to make other people interesting. (George Jean Nathan)
I think I’ll get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini. (Charles Butterworth)
‘I thought your eyes looked bloodshot.’
‘You should see them from this side.’ (Loren D. Estleman)
No man is drunk so long as he can lie on the floor without holding on. (Unknown)
One martini is all right, two is too many, three is not enough. (James Thurber)
Religions change. Beer and wine remain. (Hervey Allen)
…reminds me of my expedition into the wilds of Afghanistan. We lost our corkscrew and were compelled to live on food and water for several days. (W. C. Fields)
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host. (Dorothy Parker)
The only reason I drink is because, when I’m sober, I think I am Eddie Fisher. (Dean Martin)
The trouble with the world is that everybody in it is three drinks behind. (Humphrey Bogart)
Well, the handwriting is on the floor. (Joe E. Lewis)
What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch? (W. C. Fields)
You can’t drown your troubles in booze… because troubles can swim. (Margaret Millar)
ALIENATION
Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win. (One of the Oakland Seven)
Each of us has to swallow his toad every morning. (Emile Zola)
I’m trying to arrange my life so that I don’t even have to be present. (Unknown)
I wore a neck brace for over a year. Not that I really needed it… I was just tired of holding my head up. (Margaret Smith)
Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day. (Sarah Miles)
What fresh hell is this? (Dorothy Parker)
People make me pro-nuclear. (Margaret Smith)
We have met the enemy and they are us. (Pogo)
Whatever it is, I’m against it. (Nat Shapiro)
ALTRUISM
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression. (C. S. Lewis)
AMERICA
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people. (Gloria Steinem)
America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for $1 and use it up in two weeks. (John Barrymore)
America is the land of the spree and the home of the crave. (Unknown)
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. (Georges Clemenceau)
Anything anybody can say about America is true. (Emmitt Grogan)
In America, an hour is forty minutes. (German Proverb)
I have a map of the United States. Actual size. (Steven Wright)
In America, when you attack the establishment, they don’t put you in jail or a mental institution, they do something worse, and they make you a member of the establishment. (Art Buchwald)
Maybe there was an America in the thirties; maybe it was all Frank Capra. (John Cassavetes)
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. (H. L. Mencken)
Our civilization has since developed a mania for duplication. Because there are so many duplicates of everything, our culture can be said to be fireproof. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
They are not men, they are not women, and they are Americans. (Pablo Picasso)
Western civilization is a man running with increased speed through an air-sealed tunnel in fear of additional oxygen. (Philip Slater)
You don’t die in the United States, you underachieve. (Jerzy Kosinski)
AMERICAN CITIES/STATES (Also see: Hollywood)
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. (Alison Lurie)
Behind the billboards lies New Jersey. (Irwin S. Cobb)
City life: Millions of people being lonesome together. (Henry David Thoreau)
In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn. (Oliver Herford)
It’s an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world. (George Sanders)?
Los Angeles: A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. (Raymond Chandler)
Los Angeles is a city with the personality of a paper cup. (Raymond Chandler)
New York offers the gift of loneliness. (E. B. White)
Nebraska is proof that Hell is full and the dead are walking the earth. (Unknown)
California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange. (Fred Allen)
No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. (E. B. White)
Oh to be in Los Angeles when the polyethylene-vinyl trees are in bloom! (Herb Gold)
Regarding Oakland, California: ‘There is no there, there. (Gertrude Stein)
She is what people are beginning to call mellow, a personality trait highly regarded in California. (Lindsay Abrams)
Southerners can never resist a losing cause. (Margaret Mitchell)
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, and then names the streets after them. (Bill Vaughn)
There is no justice in a country where all the warm states were reserved for non-intellectuals. (Lucille Kallen)
Those mosquitoes in New Jersey are so big, one of them stung a Greyhound Bus the other night and it swelled up so badly, they couldn’t get into the Lincoln Tunnel. (Fred Allen)
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
You ain’t born in the South unless you’re a fool. (Lillian Hellman)
You haven’t lived until you’ve died in California. (Mort Saul)
Vermont: where the men are men and the sheep are nervous. (Simian)
ANGER
Anyone who angers you conquers you. (Unknown)
Beware the fury of a patient man. (John Dryden)
He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument. (Fred Allen)
He owned and operated a ferocious temper. (T. R. Ybarra)
Her voice was as cool as boarding house soup. (Raymond Chandler)
His huff arrived and he departed in it. (Alexander Woollcott)
His smile was stiff as frozen fish. (Raymond Chandler)
I was very very MILDLY irritated… (Raymond Chandler)
Anger is what you feel when there is still a future. Regret is for the past. (Lynn Meyer)
The worst-tempered people I’ve ever met were people who knew they were wrong. (Wilson Mizner)
ANIMALS
A chicken… has the usual hectic eyes… as if they knew from birth that they would be decapitated. (Eleanor Clark)
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance and to turn around three times before lying down. (Robert Benchley)
I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me. (Noel Coward)
I find penguins at present are the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin. (John Ruskin)
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. (Samuel Butler)
Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creature in this world. (Werner Herzog)
We hope that when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all picnics. (Bill Vaughn)
Woody Allen calls pigeons, ‘rats with wings.’
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp vindictive glance. (James Thurber)
ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeology is very much concerned with garbage. (Judy Birmingham)
ARCHITECTURE
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise clients to plant vines. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
All modernist architecture is a denial of the spirit, ingenuity and aesthetic of man. I loathe it and am in agreement with Auberon Waugh, who suggests that upon meeting an architect at a party, you simply hit him. (Bob Geldof)
Architecture in general is frozen music. (Friedrich Von Schelling)
No house should ever be ON any hill, or ON anything. It should be OF a hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could together each be happier for the other. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
Well-building hath three qualities - commodity, firmness and delight. (Unknown)
We should learn from the snail; it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
ART
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. (Pablo Picasso)
A line is a dot that went for a walk. (Paul Klee)
A portrait is a picture in which there is something wrong with the mouth. (Eugene Speicher)
An artist’s work is his alibi. (Jean Cocteau)
An artist told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells. (Grandma Moses)
Art is man added to nature. (Francis Bacon)
Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick. Or is about to be. (Noel Coward)
Art isn’t possible from an unprincipled man. It is one of the grandest things about art. (Herman G. Weinberg)
Art is the art of leaving out. (Claude Debussy)
Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary. (Amedee Ozenfant)
Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness. (Joris Karl Huysmans)
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. (G. K. Chesterton)
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. (Henri Matisse)
Doodling is the brooding of the hand. (Saul Steinberg)
If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens. (Grandma Moses)
If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint. (Mrs. Pablo Picasso)
If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint. (Edward Hopper)
I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst distraction. (Saul Bellow)
It is easier to replace a dead man than a good picture. (George Bernard Shaw)
…it’s the wounded who take to art: no one wins more races than the crippled in his sleep. (Paul Theroux)
I wish to astonish Paris with an apple. (Paul Cezanne)
Love art in your own selves, and yourselves in art. (Konstantin Stanislavsky)
Moonlight is sculpture. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing. (Sydney Smith)
Simplicity in art is the hardest thing to achieve. Technique can be learned. (Fritz Kreisler)
The best art almost be sentimental but doesn’t. (Unknown)
The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable. (Charles Bukowski)
The surest sign of an artist’s poverty was his self-portrait. (Pablo Picasso)
There are two ways of disliking art; one is to dislike it - the other to like it rationally. (Oscar Wilde)
They had a notice, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE PAINTINGS. They should forbid the paintings to touch you. (Shirley Hazzard)
They leaned toward the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, wth generous assistance from its title. (H. H. Munro - Saki)
This is either a forgery or damn clever original! (Frank Sullivan)
To consult rules of composition before making a picture is a little consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. (Edward Weston)
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic. (Pablo Picasso)
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience, if only one has a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. (G. K. Chesterton)
What a fuss art is sometimes, dearie. (Edward Burra)
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. (Homer Saint-Gaudens)
When someone complained that Gertrude Stein’s portrait didn’t look like her, Picasso said, ‘It will.’
When Tristan Bernard was asked, ‘If a fire broke out in the Louvre and you could save one painting, which one would it be?’ Bernard’s reply was: ‘The one nearest the exit.’
‘You can spot the phonies, ‘I managed to put in. ‘UNTITLED - that’s a cry for help. (Paul Theroux)
~ ~ ~
~ B ~
Babies
Bachelorhood
Baldness
Beards
Beauty
Belonging
Books
Boredom
Bores
Bosses
Brotherhood
BABIES
A baby grabs the universe with his eyes before shaping it with his hands. (Nestor Almondros)
Babies are such a nice way to start people. (Don Herold)
We have never understood the fear of some parents about babies getting mixed up in the hospital. What difference does it make so long as you get a good one? (Heywood Broun)
The worse feature of a baby is its mother’s singing. (Frank McKinney Hubbard)
When the (Kenneth) Tynans telegraphed Gore Vidal, asking if he would be godfather to their newborn son, Vidal wired back, ‘Always a godfather, never a god.’
When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists. (Stephen Fry)
BACHELORHOOD
Being an old maid is like death by drowning a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle. (Edna Ferber)
…he remained a bachelor because he thought that married men made poor husbands. (Frank Crowninshield)
BALDNESS
A hair on the head is worth two on the brush. (Unknown)
Baldheaded people should remember that when God made heads, He covered up the ones He didn’t like. (Unknown)
Better a bald head than none at all. (Unknown)
No matter how well a toupee blends in back, it always looks like hell in front. (Sam Levenson)
The most delightful advantage of being bald - one can HEAR snowflakes. (R. G. Daniels)
There’s one nice thing about baldness, it’s neat. (Unknown)
BEARDS
Is that a beard or are you eating a muskrat? (Dr. Gonzo)
That ornamental excrement which groweth beneath the chin. (Thomas Fuller)
BEAUTY
All beauty implies completeness (Ernest Hello)
A narcissist is someone better looking than yourself. (Gore Vidal)
A woman’s beauty is one of her great missions. (Richard Le Gallianne)
Beauty is a kind of genius. (Unknown)
Beauty is not caused. It is. (Emily Dickinson)
Beauty is only skin. (Unknown)
Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Lore Segal)
But the next moment the breaking of her smile would redistribute her beauty’s emphasis… (Colin Thubron)
Circumstances alter faces. (Carolyn Wells)
Examine the contents, not the bottle. (Talmud)
For extra decoration, she had removed her earrings. (Djuna Barnes)
He enjoyed beautiful women. They disturbed his objectivity. (E. V. Cunninghan)
I always look well when I’m near death. (Greta Garbo)
I am told when surface beauty is gone, the real woman emerges. (Linda Darnell)
I look at you and I see rebellion. I see the scars of liquor and dope. I see pain and reckless abandon. Oh Ronald, it’s such a GOOD face. (William F. Brown)
It adds a precious seeing to the eye. (William Shakespeare)
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. (Leo Tolstoy)
It is the beautiful bird which gets caged. (Chinese Proverb)
Let us leave pretty women to men with imagination. (Marcel Proust)
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile? (William Shakespeare)
Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age. (Elliott Paul)
She is a peacock in everything but beauty. (Oscar Wilde)
She was a blonde by request… (Lesley Egan)
Sometimes people complain that I dress badly. I say this: if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck. (Brenda Ueland)?
The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. (D. H. Lawrence)
The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been removed. (Henry Ford)
There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion. (Francis Bacon)
There’s nothing moral about beauty. (Nadine Gordimer)
To marry a woman for her beauty is like buying a house for its paint. (Unknown)
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting. (Kahlil Gibran)
When I get through with you, you’ll look - well, what do you call beautiful? A tree? You’ll look like a tree. (Fred Astaire)
Why, you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen and that’s not saying much for you. (Groucho Marx)
You are beautiful and faded … Like an old opera tune… Played upon a harpsichord. (Amy Lowell)
You’re nice and thin. Your eyes are funny. You move easily. I’m afraid you’re terribly attractive. (Noel Coward)
You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes. (Beulah Bondi)
BELONGING
I belonged in Idle Valley like pearl onion on a banana split. (Raymond Chandler)
Belonging is a matter of deciding to. (Louise Erdrich)
Happiness… consists of two things; first, in being where you belong and second and best - in comfortably going through every life,, that is, having had a good night’s sleep and not being hurt by new shoes. (Theodor Fontane)
…being with you is like walking on a very clear morning - definitely the sensation of belonging there (E. B. White)
BOOKS
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. (Chinese Proverb)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. (G. K. Chesterton)
An editor is a man who knows exactly what he wants but isn’t quite sure. (Walter Davenport)
Fine words - I wonder where you stole them? (Jonathan Swift)
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. (Andre Maurois)
Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn. (Leo Tolstoy)
I’ve given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself. (Oscar Levant)
I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. (Woodrow Wilson)
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me. (Anatole France)
Raymond Chandler had just received a copy of his newly published book and said, ‘Seeing a copy of it… was like looking in an unexpected mirror just after falling downstairs.’
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body (Sir Richard Steele)
Some people read because they are too lazy to think. (G. C. Lichtenberg)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. (Mark Twain)
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. (Oscar Wilde)
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. (George Bernard Shaw)
There is no worse robber than a bad book. (Italian Proverb)
There is no worse robber than a bad book. (Italian Proverb)
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us reading the old ones. (Joseph Joubert)
To me, detective stories are a great solace, a sort of mental knitting, where it doesn’t matter if you drop a stitch. (Rupert Hart-Davis)
What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading. (Alice James)
What I begin by reading, I must finish by acting. (Henry David Thoreau)
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. (Desiderius Erasmus)
?When Mark Twain was asked whether he liked books, he said he liked a thin book because it would steady a table, a leather volume because it would strop a razor, and a heavy book because it could be thrown at a cat.
When the town of Franklin, Massachusetts, asked Benjamin Franklin to donate funds toward the purchase of a bell for the meeting-house chapel. Franklin advised that he would donate books instead. ‘Sense being preferable to sound.’ (John Clyde Oswald)
BOREDOM
Boredom slays more of existence than war. (Norman Mailer)
Even the gods get bored and can’t do anything about it. (Fredrich Nietzche)
Oh, snore. (Ann Arensberg)
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn’t, of course. It’s a small niggling thing. (Josephine Tey)
‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
BORES
A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. (Gian Vincenzo Gravina)
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him. (Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux)
A bore is a man who spends so much time talking about himself that you can’t talk about yourself. (Melville D. Landon)
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything. (Don Marquis)
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. (Oscar Wilde)
Fools grow without watering. (Thomas Fuller)
He divides conversation into two categories - when you speak and when you listen to yourself speak. (Unknown)
He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful. (Sydney Smith)
He knows so little and knows it so fluently. (Ellen Glasgow)
He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry. (Cyril Connolly)
I am put in mind… of Lord Randolph Churchill, who once, getting into the clutches of a bore at his club, rang the bell and said to the waiter, ‘Would you mind listening to the end of this story? And left the room. (Amanda Cross)
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. (Oscar Wilde)
Make him laugh and he will think you’re a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time. (Norman Ford)
Now when I bore people at a party, they think it’s their fault. (Henry Kissinger)
Only the shallow know themselves. (Oscar Wilde)
Some people say longer in an hour than others do in a month. (William Dean Howells)
The long defeat of doing nothing very well. (Graham Greene)
When told by a notorious bore that he had passed by (Oscar) Wilde’s house the previous day, Wilde exclaimed, ‘Oh, thank you very much.’
BOSSES
As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear, and next best, the people hate. (Lao Tzu)
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job. (Peter Drucker)
To lead the people, walk behind them. (Lao Tzu)
BROTHERHOOD
Hate the sin and love the sinner. (Mahatma Gandhi)
The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep. (Woody Allen)
Why do we hold together only when we need each other… why not always? (Georg Wilhelm Pabst)
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~ C ~
Catholicism
Censorship
Change
Character
Children
Cleanliness
Committees
Common sense
Communication
Computers
Conceit
Courage
Creativity
Crime
Critics/criticism
Crowds
Culture
CATHOLICISM
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. (H. L. Mencken)
I was fired from there (Catholic School), for a lot of things… among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. (Dorothy Parker)
You don’t know how much nastier I would be if I hadn’t become a Catholic. (Evelyn Waugh)
CENSORSHIP
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. (George Bernard Shaw)
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there. (Clare Boothe Luce)
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CHANGE
I keep trying to recapture myself at different periods of my life and it is impossible because even as I write, I change. (Erica Jong)